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Dallison held out two-pence for the paper, but it was at the woman that she looked. "Oh, Mrs. Hughs," she said, "we've been expecting you to hem the curtains!" The woman slightly pressed the baby. "I am very sorry, ma'am. I knew I was expected, but I've had such trouble." Cecilia winced. "Oh, really?" "Yes, m'm; it's my husband." "Oh, dear!" Cecilia murmured. "But why didn't you come to us?"
Hughs had been a thief in a low degree for some years before he fell into the confederacy of Sherwood and Weedon, to which, as he frankly owned, he was drawn by his own previous inclination rather than the persuasions of any of his companions.
There is left in every man something of the primeval love of stalking. The delicate Hilary, in cooler blood, would have revolted at the notion of dogging people's footsteps. He now experienced the holy pleasures of the chase. Certain that Hughs was really following the girl, he had but to keep him in sight and remain unseen.
These malefactors suffered on the 20th of May, 1728; Rawlins being twenty-two, Ashley, twenty-six; Rouden, twenty-four; Benson, twenty-four; Gale, seventeen; Crowder, twenty-two; Toon, twenty-five; Hornby, twenty-one; Sefton, twenty-six; and Nichols, forty years of age. See page 463. The Lives of RICHARD HUGHS and BRYAN MACGUIRE, Highwaymen and Footpads
What she was thinking of he could not tell. There were so many things she might be thinking of. She, too, no doubt, had seen her grandeur, if but in the solitary drive away from the church where, eight years ago, she and Hughs had listened to the words now haunting Creed.
"Well?" she said, "but what have you come about, please? You see I'm busy." Hughs' face changed. Its stolidity vanished, the eyes became as quick, passionate, and leaping as a dark torrent. He was more violently alive than she had ever seen a man. Had it been a woman she would have felt as Cecilia had felt with Mrs.
She glanced at him with mild surprise. "What's this, Cis," he said, "about a baby dead? Thyme's quite upset about it; and your dad's in the drawing-room!" With the quick instinct that was woven into all her gentle treading, Cecilia's thoughts flew she could not have told why first to the little model, then to Mrs. Hughs. "Dead?" she said. "Oh, poor woman!" "What woman?" Stephen asked.
Cecilia answered with a frown: "Don't chaff, Stephen; I'm perfectly serious about Mrs. Hughs." "Well, I don't see what I can do for the good woman, my dear. One can't interfere in these domestic matters." "But it seems dreadful that we who employ her should be able to do nothing for her. Don't you think so, B.?" "I suppose we could do something for her if we wanted to badly enough."
And unobserved, he, too, had his watcher the little model, sheltering behind a tall grave. Two men in rusty black bore the little coffin; then came the white-robed chaplain; then Mrs. Hughs and her little son; close behind, his head thrust forward with trembling movements from side to side, old Creed; and, last of all, young Martin Stone. Hilary joined the young doctor.
And she got on very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops. She mentioned neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs. In all this rigmarole, told with such obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never quite out of her eyes when they were fixed on Hilary.
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